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Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings: an American Controversy' H-SHEAR Hellenbrand on Gordon-Reed, 'Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings: An American Controversy' Review published on Sunday, February 1, 1998 Annette Gordon-Reed. Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings: An American Controversy. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1997. xx + 288 pp. $29.95 (cloth), ISBN 978-0-8139-1698-9. Reviewed by Harry Hellenbrand (University of Minnesota-Duluth)Published on H-SHEAR (February, 1998) Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings: An American Controversy In his unfinished essay, "The Jefferson Scandals," Douglass Adair sermonized that the "research historian follows an ancient and standard method" when confronted with conflicting evidence and contradictory claims: "The technique for extracting or distilling the creditable items from a report that may be full of error is to seek independent corroboration, detail by detail."[1] Consequently, Adair weighed the testimony of two "prejudiced witnesses," Sally Hemings (through her son Madison Hemings) and Thomas Jefferson Randolph (through historian Henry S. Randall) against the "neutral statistics" (p. 179) of Jefferson'sFarm Book and the written testimony of another key witness, Jefferson's overseer, Edmund Bacon. Along the way, Adair introduced seemingly incontrovertible assertions about Jefferson's "known character" (p. 182) that were gleaned from his private correspondence and public pronouncements. Adair concluded that "it is possible to prove that Jefferson was innocent of (James) Callender's charges that Jefferson cohabited with Sally Hemings" (p. 169). Gavel down, case closed. Of course, the case never has closed. In "The Strange Career of Thomas Jefferson: Race and Slavery in American Memory, 1943-1993"[2], Scott A. French and Edward L. Ayers reviewed the scholarly and popular literature about Jefferson and Hemings, before and after Adair's influential essay. They showed how ideological trends and current events influenced accounts of whether a liaison between Hemings and Jefferson occurred. These days, Jefferson's historians cannot hide from journalists like Ben Wattenberg and documentarians like Ken Burns who are seeking up-to-the-minute verdicts about miscegenation at Monticello.[3] The most recent book on the subject, Annette Gordon-Reed's Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings: An American Controversy, is the best so far. It is a thorough and arch "critique of the defense which has been mounted to counter the notion of a Jefferson-Hemings liaison" (p. xiv), with genealogical tables, endnotes, an appendix of capsule biographies, and four other appendices of documents crucial to the argument. No doubt Gordon-Reed, trained in the law, bristled at Adair's legal language, which helped to rationalize his undocumented theory about Sally Hemings. According to Adair, Sally Hemings, spurned by lover Peter Carr (Thomas Jefferson's nephew), seized on James Callender's calumny against Jefferson and "this wench Sally" to wreak havoc on the Jefferson family which, excluding Citation: H-Net Reviews. Hellenbrand on Gordon-Reed, 'Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings: An American Controversy'. H-SHEAR. 07-10-2013. https://networks.h-net.org/node/950/reviews/1003/hellenbrand-gordon-reed-thomas-jefferson-and-sally-hemings-american Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License. 1 H-SHEAR Peter, treated her clan so well for so long, given that they were slaves and all (pp. 61, 204). Gordon- Reed adapts the legal concepts of "procedural fairness" (p. xvi), "direct evidence," (p. 213), "extrinsic evidence," and "burden of proof" (p. 215) to refute the "bad history" (p. 16) about Hemings and Jefferson. She claims that historians such as Douglass Adair, Dumas Malone, Virginius Dabney, and Charles Chester Miller have compensated for the absence of "absolute proof" (p. xv) by deploying "every stereotype of black people" (p. xiii) in their quest to absolve Jefferson of miscegenation. (However, late in life Malone conceded to The New York Times that Jefferson might have slipped once or twice; Gordon-Reed, pp. 156-57). According to Gordon-Reed, the net effect has been that the story of the Hemings family has not been told fairly. The "real scandal" is that history and the people who read it have been ill served (p. xvii). Gordon-Reed's book is an indictment of the "authority of white male scholars" of Jefferson (French and Ayers, p. 419) who have labored to keep "the consideration of the Sally Hemings story...in a time warp," untouched by contemporary Southern historiography and revisionist views of Jefferson's career (Gordon-Reed, pp. xii-xix). Gordon-Reed's effort to rehabilitate the reputation of The Memoirs of Madison Hemings (pp. 245-48) exemplifies her method. While Merrill D. Peterson found much of Madison's story "vivid and accurate"[4], Adair compared it to a "lurid novel" (Fame, p. 171). According to Gordon-Reed, others like Dabney, Malone, and Miller argued that its polished language indicated that S. F. Wetmore, to whom Madison Hemings told the story, took liberties (pp. 8-22). Either Wetmore's sympathy with the freedmen or Madison Hemings's "pathetic wish" to elevate his station or both madeThe Memoirs unreliable, not trustworthy direct evidence (Peterson's phrase, quoted in Gordon-Reed, p. 82). Israel Jefferson's corroborating Memoirs about Jefferson and Sally Hemings's intimacy (pp. 249-53) was suspicious for similar reasons, historians have claimed. It, too, was told to Wetmore. But Gordon- Reed claims that none of the people who have discredited Madison Hemings and Israel Jefferson did sufficient research to find out that stories about Thomas Jefferson as the father of Madison and his brother Eston were circulating in Ohio, where the two men lived, decades before Wetmore published their memoirs (pp. 14-15). Nor did the discreditors consider why, if Madison's story was fabricated, it did not include James Callender's luridly famous claim about Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings conceiving a mulatto "President Tom" during their stay in Paris (p. 24). Instead, Madison Hemings reported that his mother lost her first child, conceived in France, shortly after it was born in Virginia. Indeed, Madison Hemings's Memoirs reads "simply as a story," not a cynical case, Gordon-Reed says (p. 27). For instance, he says that his mother extracted a "solemn pledge" (p. 246) from Jefferson to free her children at age twenty-one, but then he "makes no use of the specifics of this promise" (p. 24). He does not mention as confirming evidence the ages at which his siblings Beverley and Harriet "strolled." And although he does mention the provision in Jefferson's will that he and Eston be freed at twenty-one, he does not link that back to the pledge. Also why, Gordon-Reed asks, would two demonstrably sane black men, Madison Hemings and Israel Jefferson, help to concoct stories that were more likely to inflame their neighbors than increase their social cachet (p. 12)? Or why assume without compelling evidence that they were feeble-minded pawns in the hands of white radicals (p. 11)? As if she were cross-examining those chroniclers who have impeached Madison Hemings' reliability, Gordon-Reed establishes doubt in their master narratives. This doubt opens space for believing Madison Hemings, Israel Jefferson, and even James Callender (though the last case is trying). She Citation: H-Net Reviews. Hellenbrand on Gordon-Reed, 'Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings: An American Controversy'. H-SHEAR. 07-10-2013. https://networks.h-net.org/node/950/reviews/1003/hellenbrand-gordon-reed-thomas-jefferson-and-sally-hemings-american Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License. 2 H-SHEAR reminds us, for instance, that "exaggeration, rather than fabrication, was Callender's journalistic flaw" (p. 62). While he claimed that Sally Hemings had five children, one of whom was the notorious "Tom," he might not have known, as we know again now, that three had died by 1799. Either Callender or a source could have fabricated Tom out of knowledge about Beverley (born in 1798) and the persistent story that Sally conceived in France (p. 76). But the whole of Callender's account, as extrinsic evidence, is not necessarily wrong. The stories of Edmund Bacon, Thomas Jefferson Randolph, Ellen Randolph Coolidge, and Henry S. Randall have been cited to discredit the accounts of a liaison. However, Gordon-Reed maintains that procedural fairness requires us to consider their pronounced fondness for Jefferson as disqualifying as the motives of Wetmore, Madison Hemings, and Israel Jefferson (p. 34). Other doubts arise, Gordon-Reed implies. Bacon reported that he often saw the person who was the father of Harriet Hemings coming out of Sally's room in the morning, and this culprit was not Thomas Jefferson (pp. 26, 92-93). But according to Jefferson's Farm Book, Bacon became overseer after Harriet's birth.[5] Apparently, Thomas Jefferson Randolph told historian Henry S. Randall that he "had charge of Monticello" when Peter Carr and Sally were producing "the progeny which resembled Mr. Jefferson" (pp. 254-55). But Gordon-Reed points out that Thomas Jefferson Randolph was only a boy, and not in charge, during this time (p. 85). While Ellen Randolph Coolidge lamented that "it is impossible to prove that Mr. Jefferson never had a mistress or colored children," she nonetheless wrote that her brother, Thomas Jefferson Randolph, believed Samuel Carr, not Peter, to be the culprit (p. 258). Did Randall or Coolidge misinterpret his statements, Gordon-Reed asks (pp. 87-88)? Or was Randolph telling different stories to different persons? Randall claimed that he once confirmed, but then forgot how he did so, that Jefferson could not have been present when "the slave who most resembled him" was born (p. 255). But, as Gordon-Reed says, a comparison of the lists of slaves in theFarm Book with the chronology of Jefferson's adult life shows that Thomas Jefferson was at Monticello in time to have impregnated Sally Hemings before her births (pp.
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